MRS. CARTERET IS CONGRATULATED.
"I am positively dying to see her--I am indeed; you have no notion what a darling she is. I am sure you would be delighted with her, Fitzwilliam!"
These gushing sentiments were uttered by Lady Davyntry, and addressed to her brother, Mr. Fitzwilliam Meriton Baldwin, while they were at breakfast together, on the morning after Lady Davyntry's note had been received at Chayleigh.
Lady Davyntry was given to gushing. She was a harmless, emotional kind of woman, who had led a perfectly discreet and comfortable life, and had never known a sorrow until the death of her husband.
Lady Davyntry was a very pretty woman--as pretty at her present age, thirty-five, as she had been at any time since she had turned the corner of extreme youth. Her mild, lambent blue eyes were as bright as they had ever been, and her fair, rather thick skin had lost neither its purity nor its polish.
She had been rich, well cared for, and happy all her life; she had never had any occasion to exert herself; the "sorrows of others" had cast but light and fleeting "shadows over" her; and her sentimentalism, and the romance which had not been much developed in the course of her prosperous uneventful life, were quite ready for any demands that might be made upon them by an event of so much local interest as the return of Mr. Carteret's daughter, whose marriage was generally understood to have been very unfortunate.
She was interested in the occurrence for more than the sufficient reason that she had liked and pitied Margaret in her neglected girlhood. Perhaps the strongest sentiment of dislike which had ever been called forth in the amiable nature of Lady Davyntry had been excited by, and towards, Mrs. Carteret.
The two women were entirely antagonistic to each other; and Lady Davyntry felt a thrill of gratification on hearing of Margaret's return, in which a conviction that that event had taken place without Mrs. Carteret's sanction, and would not be to her taste, had a decided share.
She had favoured her brother--to whom she was very much attached, and who was so much younger than she that he did not inspire her with any of the salutary reserve which induces sisters to disguise their favourite weaknesses from brothers--with a full and free statement of her feelings on this point, and he had not strongly combated her antipathy to Mrs. Carteret. The truth was, he shared it.
Mr. Baldwin had risen from the breakfast-table, and was standing, newspaper in hand, by a large window which commanded an extensive view, including the precise angle of the little demesne of Chayleigh in which the rear of the house and the window of Margaret's room, with its frame of passion-flowers, could be seen--not distinctly, but clearly enough to induce the eyes of any one gazing forth upon the scene to rest upon it mechanically.